Gizmosmith

LabVIEW is awful

This is really just a rant, I’ll have neat and useful information in my next post, I swear.

Everything that this guy lists that I have had the displeasure to run into is correct, and worse than he makes it sound.

LabView is a graphical environment for creating processes to manage a flow of data, usually acquiring it from some device, performing some processing on it, and displaying or recording the data. To create a process in LabView, you drag and drop little boxes which do things to the data, and then point and click to draw wires between the boxes, which show how the data should flow. This is kind of a problem, for a number of reasons.

Imagine if you are trying to get the 1st through the 50th elements of an array. Near as I can tell, in LabView, you use an “Index Array” block, wired to fifty integer constant blocks (each containing a digit in 0..49) with 50 wires. The “Array Subset” block sounds promising, but actually gets you an array, not the elements. If you want to expand this to, say, 100 elements, you need to add 50 more constants, and 50 more wires. This gets tedious very fast, but I guess it’s not so bad, if you otherwise can’t program, and so don’t know that real programming languages will just let you operate on members of an array without pulling them out first, using syntax that takes more time to describe than it does to type.

See, if I wanted to get the fifth element of an array of integers in LabVIEW, multiply it by 10, and put it back, I’d have to use an “Index Array” block, an “Integer Constant” block with the value 4 (zero-based array indexing) to get the value, a “Multiply” block and an “Integer Constant” block with the value 12 to do the multiplication, and a “Replace Array Subset” block using the first “Integer Constant” block to put the value back. This would also require at least 8 wires. I would have to put all of those things in place, and then wire them up using the mouse.

Or I could type “arrayName[4] = arrayName[4] * 10;”, assuming I was working in C, C++, or Java. For Python and Perl, leave off the semicolon. Oh hey. See what I did there? The same operation, only mine is good for 5 languages, takes around 33 characters (so seconds to type), and is all done without a single mouse click or paying thousands of dollars for a license. If that were the only problem with LabVIEW, it would be enough to exclude it from me ever considering using it for anything. Since I don’t get to make that choice at work, I just spent the better part of three days trying to get it to format some data and send that data over the network. For those playing along at home, slinging some data across the network is maybe a 20 minute “problem” in any other language that real humans use (brainfuck, befunge, etc. don’t count, and assembly is a corner case).

The miserable interface doesn’t just make it slow to create anything in LabVIEW. It also makes it easy to get wrong in annoying ways. The analog of a typo in Labview is connecting things wrong. Given that you are aiming for a ~10 pixel target with no space between it and and the equally connectable, but incorrect, targets on either side of it, the quality of your code depends on the resolution of your mouse and your visual acuity. That’s right. Not your ability to break down a problem into its component parts and determine what algorithms solve those parts. Your mousing skills are what determines if you got your “code” right. This also means that if you are hooking up 60 connections, and you accidentally skip one, you have to move a bunch of the other connections to get the one that you skipped back into place. God help you if you don’t catch it, as the data will be ok, but one element of it will be out of order.